Well, we are almost at the end of 2020 and a very promising new year is about to come! Here in Greece the summer is the hottest season for weddings, so many wedding photographers must be at the forefront of efforts to meets their clients’ needs. I thought this would be a great time to initiate blogging and share with you my favorite topic on wedding photography, or similarly on wedding cinematography, with are both the art of storytelling.
Viva la sincerità on images!
Before starting writing this post, I was looking around my living room, brainstorming and searching for the way I want to communicate my views on that issue. At the right corner of my sofa the vintage wooden rectangular camera on tripod of my grand-father Achilles was staring at me. The old black-and-white carton photos behind the thin glass of the wooden camera were telling me their story…
Indeed, it seems that the days of very formal posed images have faded out and the couples are looking for a more documentary style of wedding photography. What we are doing for meeting the couple’s expectations? We are capturing a story.
Imagine you are reading your favorite book. After a few pages, you are feeling that you put yourself in the shoes of the key players and you live their story from their perspective. From time to time, you probably take a look at the surrounding images; you make a pose and you are mentally traveling in their world. This is the moment that you have entered in the storytelling sphere.
Similarly to a book, every wedding is unique and has a story to tell. The difference is that as a wedding photographer I need to instill the story of the couple in my images, since there will be no words to tell the couple’s story; there are only my images that can keep these moments alive over time.
The storytelling wedding photography is my signature style. At these moments, all my senses are focusing on my lens in order to capture the special moment of the couple, the bride’s daddy wiping away a tear during the ceremony, the sound of the trumpet that makes people dancing to its tune, the look on the groom’s face as the bride arrives.
That’s what I adore about this style of documentary wedding photography, it stirs emotion. The images have a voice, they tell the couple’s story without words. Not only now, but in ten years’ time.
The funny part behind the storytelling wedding photography is that I was given the opportunity to shoot the happy moments of the couple, to tell the story of a couple’s precious day with my own spin, and capture genuine moments one frame at a time.